Everyone wants to make a million dollars by being a blogger. The promise of riches and internet fame is a big draw to doing it for a lot of people, and I’m sorry to say that the reality of being a blogger (even a professional blogger!) is not quite…as financially lucrative as all that. But that’s not to say that it can’t be–one of the best ways to start your empire is with an Amazon affiliate plugin.

For me, the Amazon Associates program has been one of the biggest earners for me over the years. Not only are there CPM ads like Google Adsense (you know, the normal banner ads we all love to hate), but any time someone clicks a link from your site, you get a percentage of anything they buy while the token from your site lasts in their browser. If they buy a song, you get a few cents. If they buy a new MacBook Pro and iPhone? You get…a lot more cents.

With that in mind, WZoneLite is a pretty cool WooCommerce Amazon affiliate plugin that syncs everything together so you can worry about what really matters on your site: making content that brings in the visitors so that that you can make all those cents.

The Only WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate Plugin You Need?

Basically, the whole thing is a drop shipping business through the WooCommerce storefront. For those who don’t know, drop shipping is where you act as the store and someone else fulfills and ships the other. You’re the purveyor of the goods, not the distributor. You never have any contact with the items themselves.

The only catch here is that you don’t don’t get the purchase price of the item. You get a percentage of that cost from Amazon (hence it being an affiliate program). For the customer, it’s a normal ecommerce transaction, and for you, it’s a lot more legit than just plastering banner ads and links across your site.

WZoneLite also allows you to pick and choose which items you display in your WooCommerce store, so you really can specialize with items that you trust and that your audience will love. Kettlebells for fitness sites, SSDs for tech sites, and so on and so forth.

Oh, and make sure you have WooCommerce installed, too. It’s kind of necessary.

Amazon Setup

Getting things set up is pretty simple, really. The first thing you gotta do is navigate down to your new, handy-dandy WZoneLite menu item and go into Amazon Config. Then head over to your Amazon Associates account page and login. You gotta have one of these to start raking in the dough, so if you aren’t already signed up, do so.

You’re going to need some API keys, so you can get them under the Tools -> Product Advertising API in your Amazon Associates account. Click on Join, and your keys will be right there.

Enter them back in the Amazon Config screen, and you’re golden.

Plugin and Import Setup

There are two tabs for Plugin and Import settings, but honestly, once you’re good to go with your Amazon Associates account, I wouldn’t really worry about them. At this point because they’re mostly tweaks to the functionality–the length of cookies, whether you have a reviews tab, and so forth and so on. It is similar

These are better saved until later, if you ask me (which you didn’t) because you may not know exactly how your shop is going to work best at this point.

Insane Imports!

This is where the fun begins. I am not even kidding–these imports are insane! Or at least what the menu item tells me. Once you get to this area, you get to choose the items you want to sell in your store. It could be the easiest or hardest part of the whole setup because Amazon kind of sells…everything in existence.

The Chrome Extension works super well, so if you’re a Chrome user, install it and get to importing (as you shop, even!). But for this, I am going to really focus on how I added stuff within the plugin itself using the native tools.

Type, Launch, Import

Finding what you want to put in your store is a matter of filling out a few forms. The plugin pulls from Amazon to offer suggestions based on your keywords, and you can add categories and all sorts of other options to fine tune what you’re selling. For this, I chose “WordPress.” There were quite a few options, too, as you can see here.

Hit the Launch Search button, picked out your products, and scroll down to hit the big, blue Import Products button. It may take a while to finish, but that’s because it’s taking the information from Amazon (including images and tags and categories and so on) and making you some new, shiny WooCommerce products.

Sell That Stuff!

Now, if you head to your WooCommerce All Products page, you will see so many new products, full of stock information, prices, categories and descriptions ready to be put into your store. From this point, you can treat them exactly like any other WooCommerce product you enter.

From what I have discerned, there are only two differences here:

users will be redirected checkout through Amazon, not at your site

you don’t make the checkout price, only the affiliate commission

You don’t even have to worry about the affiliate ID or anything because it comes imported with the WZone plugin. Good stuff, I tell ya.

You’ll Be Swimming in Cash like Scrooge McDuck

You’ll see how awesome of a system this is before long. Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap a lot, and mostly it’s because so many people don’t do it right. But when you are running a store on your site–a legitimate store–that provides products that you handpick, you’re going to be one step ahead of the competition.

You won’t have any of the overhead of most stores, and you will definitely see a return on this. Folks will buy from you because they trust you. They don’t click banners. No one does. We are trained to ignore them.

Looking for some alternatives to WordPress? While we might be big fans of the world’s most popular content management system, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other perfectly viable tools for you to use to build a website or blog.

In this post, I’ll dig into 12 of those WordPress alternatives, divided into three separate categories:

Self-hosted content management systems

Hosted website builders

Basic blogging platforms

Generally, you’ll find more complicated alternatives in the content management systems category and more simple solutions in the hosted website builders and blogging platforms sections.

Let’s dive in!

6 Content Management System Alternatives to WordPress

These six alternatives to WordPress are all standalone content management systems. That means, like self-hosted WordPress, you’ll need to install them on your own hosting to use them for your site.

Joomla

After WordPress, Joomla is the second most popular content management system in use. While it does have a healthy hold on second place, it’s nowhere near the popularity of WordPress – WordPress has ~60% market share, while Joomla has 6.7%.

Like WordPress, Joomla is a core software that you can extend with templates and extensions. The third-party extension community isn’t as large as WordPress, but you can find many overlapping tools. For example, Joomla has its own page builders, just like WordPress.

In the old days, people used to say that Joomla was more for static websites and WordPress was more for blogs. Obviously, that’s changed as WordPress has developed into a full-service content management system, but some of those biases still remain.

For these, and other reasons, some people say Joomla is more “enterprise ready” than WordPress. At least out of the box.

With that being said, while Joomla has improved its usability, most people still find it less beginner-friendly than WordPress. And, while the third-party extension marketplace is well-developed, you still won’t find anywhere near as many options as WordPress.

Drupal

After Joomla, Drupal is the next most popular content management system with 4.7% market share.

In comparison to WordPress, Drupal is not nearly as beginner friendly. While Drupal does offer modules and themes to extend its looks and functionality, beginners will struggle to create detailed sites with Drupal, at least in comparison to WordPress.

With that being said, that complexity leads to some advantages:

Drupal is better at handling huge amounts of data, which makes it more suited for many enterprise websites.

Drupal’s Views module lets you display different types of content in a more flexible manner than WordPress does.

Like Joomla, Drupal gives you more control over user access and permissions.

Generally, though, unless you’re a developer who already knows why Drupal is the right choice over WordPress, you’re probably better off sticking to WordPress.

Craft CMS

Craft CMS is a less well-known content management system used by some big brands like Netflix and Salesforce.

It’s a much more developer-focused content management system because it doesn’t provide front-end themes. Instead, Craft CMS exclusively provides the backend for your site. Then, you can use Craft CMS’ templating system (powered by Twig) to design the front-end of your site.

Out of the box, Craft CMS is more flexible than WordPress for defining content types. Instead of predefining content, like a WordPress post or page, Craft CMS puts you in charge of setting up your content types using 18 different types of fields.

While Craft CMS isn’t really accessible to non-developers, I’ve spoken with multiple developers who’ve raved about it. So if you’re a developer, definitely give it a look.

3 Website Builder Alternatives to WordPress

Unlike the content management system alternatives above, these three tools can all be classified as website builders. That means you don’t need to install the software on your own website.

Instead, each provider hosts the software for you and you build your website via their interface. You can still use your own domain name – it’s just a fundamentally different approach to ownership and maintenance.

Wix

Wix is a freemium website builder that allows you to create your entire website using drag and drop. You can choose from one of the many Wix templates and then edit them as needed to create your site.

Wix is dead simple, which is one reason so many beginners like it.

With that being said, in order to get that simplicity, you have to sacrifice flexibility.

If you’re willing to make that sacrifice, give Wix a look. Otherwise, WordPress, or any one of the other content management systems, will give you much more control over your site.

Wix does offer a free plan, but you’re unable to use your own domain name and Wix displays ads on your site unless you pay for a premium plan.

Shopify

Before the rise of WordPress plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, Shopify would never have appeared on a list of WordPress alternatives. But now that so many people are using WordPress to run an eCommerce store, I think it makes sense to include Shopify here.

Unlike Wix and Squarespace, Shopify is exclusively for creating an eCommerce store.

While you’re free to use your own domain name, Shopify handles hosting and maintaining your store.

Like WordPress, you can then extend your Shopify store further with themes and apps.

Since going public in 2015, Shopify’s stock price has shot from $28.31 to $119, which suggests people believe in Shopify’s success!

If you’re considering creating an eCommerce store, definitely give Shopify a look. And if you want to learn more about how Shopify stacks up against WordPress, we wrote an entire post comparing Shopify and WooCommerce.

3 Basic (and Free) Blogging Alternatives to WordPress

These tools won’t help you build a full website – but if you’re just looking for somewhere to publish a blog for free without needing to install a content management system like Ghost, these three sites are solid WordPress alternatives.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging system that lets you quickly publish content to your own blog. Other Tumblr users can easily share or like your content, which helps your content get discovered by more people.

Don’t expect to do anything other than publishing basic blog posts. But if that’s all you want, Tumblr is a good free option.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s competitor to WordPress.com. You can either create your blog as a subdomain of blogspot.com or use your own domain name.

While Blogger isn’t as popular as it once was, it’s still a nice free solution to create your own blog. And because it’s owned by Google, it’s easy to add Google AdSense to your blog for some extra earnings.

The world isn’t black and white, so why does your website need to be black and white? Ok – there aren’t many entirely black and white websites. But that doesn’t mean we still can’t make the web more colorful. And to give you the inspiration to do just that, we’ve collected some gorgeous examples of colorful websites to get your creative juices flowing.

While it would be easy to fill this list with websites from design and branding agencies, we tried to find websites that span all niches and design styles. That means you’ll find agencies, eCommerce stores, SaaS products, F&B companies, and more. The only unifying factor is that they’re all colorful!

Jump in and get inspired…

1. Odd Pears Socks

Odd Pears goes with a bold colorful look that matches the quirky socks that they sell. So not only is their website design eye-catching, but it also fits their brand and aesthetic.

While the actual product pages aren’t quite as colorful, the socks themselves still add a dose of color to the entire site. Definitely a cool eCommerce store (even if it is built on Shopify instead of WooCommerce!)

2. Bonnaroo

Bonnaroo, the massive music and arts festival in Manchester, TN, goes with a colorful psychedelic look that meshes well with the spirit of the festival.

The bold header is site-wide, so visitors to every page are going to get a serious dose of color.

3. Aida

Aida is a New York City-based line of “eating and entertaining essentials. “ They have whimsical branding that’s reflected in their site’s colorful design.

While Aida’s website does incorporate tons of colors, it still manages to put product imagery front and center.

4. Mambo Mambo

Mambo Mambo is a branding agency with about as bold and colorful a homepage as you’ll find. Beyond the eye-catching colors, Mambo Mambo’s site also features a neat scroll effect as you move down the rest of the colorful page.

5. Milkable

Milkable is a creative agency with an attention-grabbing and colorful homepage. Despite the bevy of milk branding, Milkable is, as far as I can tell, not funded by the dairy industry.

6. Baianat

Baianat is a web and graphic design studio with a bold red homepage. Beyond their own site, you can also find plenty more colorful websites in Baianat’s client list. It appears Baianat is an overall fan of color!

7. Avocado

Avocado maintains the same colorful style as you scroll through the menu and contact information.

8. Perfect Day

While Milkable wasn’t about milk, Perfect Day keeps a similar aesthetic to…actually talk about milk. Well, not dairy milk – but “animal-free dairy products that taste like the real thing.”

9. Litmus

Litmus is a good example of how SaaS products can still have colorful websites. This is a tool to help improve email deliverability. And while that’s a fairly dry subject, this company keeps things exciting with its colorful website design.

10. Wistia

Wistia is another SaaS company that doesn’t shy away from color. Beyond the teal background, they bring in dashes of other colors with the pencils, oranges, and other desk items.

In addition to looking great, the colorful design helps reinforce their branding of “Built for business. Way more fun.”

11. 3 Sided Cube

3 Sided Cube is an app development shop with a bold neon homepage. They also don’t beat around the bush with that they do! The iPhone mockup screens help to make the neon green background less overwhelming and add some additional color.

12. PepsiCo Beverage Facts

Let’s mix things up by getting a major corporation into the list! PepsiCo Beverage Facts is PepsiCo’s website where consumers can learn more about what goes into PepsiCo’s beverages.

It features a colorful blue design that fits PepsiCo’s branding.

13. Chipotle Savor Wavs

Chipotle Savor Wavs is a “musical and visual experience” based on Chipotle’s ingredients. Yeah, that’s fairly odd. But it’s also a great example of a colorful website.

14. Essentially Geared Wine

Wine in a can? Yes, that is part of what Essentially Geared Wine is advertising on its website. As you scroll down the website, the colors on both the can and the background change. Like Aida, it manages to both be colorful and incorporate plenty of product visuals.

15. Packwire

Packwire is a service that helps people create custom boxes. For example, an eCommerce store could use Packwire to create branded boxes to ship their products in.

Because cardboard boxes aren’t the most exciting industry, Packwire is another good example of how you can use color to make a dull industry a little less boring.

16. Anywhere

Anywhere is a “handbook for digital nomads” from AND CO. While the product imagery itself is already colorful, the bright red background only takes things up a notch.

This one is both a good example of a colorful website as well as a handy resource if you’re a location-independent developer.

17. 7UP Lemon Lemon

18. Havaianas

Known best for their flip-flops, Havaianas sells sandals and accessories via their colorful store. Havaianas has always had a fairly beachy/tropical brand, so the bright colors fit well with their overall aesthetic.

19. Deskpass

Deskpass is a coworking pass that gives subscribers access to 135+ coworking spaces for one monthly rate.

Their bold yellow look keeps things light and casual, which fits the branding that most coworking enthusiasts enjoy.

20. Sweet Leaf Tea

Sweet Leaf Tea is a popular brand of flavored iced tea. Their product packaging has always been colorful, so it’s fitting that their website is equally as colorful.

21. Austin Beer Works

Austin Beer Works is another beverage company that relies on bold colors to showcase their beers. And like Essentially Geared Wine, Austin Beer Works incorporates actual product imagery into its colorful design.

22. Word Counter

Word Counter is a nice example of a simple web app that uses color well in its design. The entire tool is one page, but it manages to differentiate itself from many of the similar tools by incorporating colorful blue tones.

23. Huxtaburger

Huxtaburger is another restaurant that’s not afraid to incorporate colors into its website design. The homepage sets a colorful tone that extends throughout the rest of the website.

24. Fotonaut

Fotonaut is a Czech service that rents out photo booths for parties and events. They heavily market how entertaining their photo booths are, so it’s only fitting that Fotonaut has its own colorful, entertaining design.

25. Survival Russian

Survival Russian is a “machine-learning app” to help users improve their Russian skills. While learning a language is a bit of a dry topic, the colorful design certainly keeps things from being boring.

Wrapping Things Up

I hope you enjoyed these 25 examples of colorful websites! Used right (that part is important), color can enhance your website designs and make for a more enjoyable experience.

Additionally, color can also enhance branding, which is especially notable with many of the whimsical products or design studios featured. Or, it can make a boring topic like cardboard boxes a little more exciting.

Now over to you – do you know any great colorful websites that are worth sharing?

There are uncountable WordPress themes out there. Most of them are well-thought-out and offer you one of the most valuable things out there: extra time to personalize the website you’ve had in mind.

To find the ideal WordPress theme, you can look around and see what’s for sale (or for free) in big market places like ThemeForest. Or, you can also explore websites that are already out there. After you’ve found a website that matches what you are looking for, the next logical step is to see what WordPress theme it was made with.

But how? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to show you in this post.

Make Sure The Website is Using WordPress

The first thing you’ll need to do is find out whether or not the website you’re visiting is made with WordPress. Because, obviously, you don’t want to end up thinking you can’t find the theme if it’s simply not made for WordPress.

There are several ways that’ll help you figure out whether a website is made with WordPress or not. In a previous post, we’ve collected the easiest solutions that’ll help you in the process. However, we’re also going to share some online tools and extensions in this post. Besides showing you the WordPress theme, some of these online tools will also show you if the website is running on WordPress or not.

1. Take a Look at The Footer

The first possibility, which only requires you to scroll to the end of the website, is taking a look at the footer of the website you’re on. However, this possibility will not always work. In fact, most websites try to hide it from their footer. Showing the WordPress theme you’ve made your website with somehow reflects that you haven’t entirely made the website yourself. But although most websites won’t have these credits, some websites will. You can usually find these credits along with the WordPress credits.

2. Look Within The Page Source

If a website doesn’t contain the credits in the footer; don’t worry. There are other possibilities as well. Like searching for the WordPress theme in the source of the website. You can approach this by searching for the word ‘themes’ within the source. By doing that, you’ll most likely run into the theme right away, as you can see in the example below.

3. Online Tools

Luckily, several online tools will also help you find out what WordPress theme a website is using. In this part of the post, we’ll share some of the best options out there. Each one of these options offers something extra and can be used in combination with the other online tools that are mentioned.

What WordPress Theme is That

The first online tool we’ll be handling is ‘What WordPress Theme is That‘. The name of their website makes it obvious that this online tool focuses entirely on finding the WordPress theme you’re looking for. You’ll just have to enter the URL and the tool will provide you with the answer you were looking for.

The very nice thing about this website is that it doesn’t only tell you what WordPress theme is being used, it’ll also show you what plugins are being used as well. Unfortunately, the online tool doesn’t detect parent themes.

What Theme

Another great tool is ‘What Theme‘. This online tool is not only made to recognize WordPress themes (including parent themes), but themes from other content management systems as well. A few of those are, besides WordPress, Joomla!, Blogger, Shopify and Drupal. It’s the same way of working as with the ‘What WordPress Theme is That’ online tool; you just have to type in the URL and discover the results.

WP Theme Detector

The next online tool we want to mention (although there are other tools out there as well) is the WP Theme Detector. Besides showing you what the WordPress theme is, it’ll also show you how it’s ranked and how popular it is within the searches on their website. This option is definitely recommendable if you’re not only looking for the WordPress theme, but also seeking the quality of appreciation for that theme.

Scan WP

The last online tool, Scan WP, is pretty similar to the ‘What Theme’ online tool. It, luckily, detects parent themes and it’ll also immediately give you the price you’ll need to pay for that theme. On top of that, it also detects the plugins that are being used on the website. In short; this online tool is definitely an effective one.

4. Browser Extensions

If you’d rather let most of the work happen automatically, you can also opt for an extension to your browser. In the last part of this post, we’ll mention some of the possibilities out there.

Scan WP Extension

If you like the Scan WP online tool, you’ll definitely like the extension for Google Chrome as well. It basically does the same thing as the online tool. The only advantage it has towards the online tool is that you’ll have to put in less of an effort. Like the online tool, this extension tells you what WordPress Theme (including parent themes) and plugins are being used.

WPSniffer

The WPSniffer is another worthy extension that’ll help you save time while searching for a WordPress theme. Unlike the Scan WP extension (that offers you an insight on the plugins that are being used), the WPSniffer only shares the WordPress theme that is being used with a link to more information about the theme.

WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector

The WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector can be used for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Besides showing you the content management system and the WordPress theme, the extension will also show you what plugins are being used on the website. Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t recognize parent themes but it’s one of the only add-ons for Mozilla Firefox out there.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we’ve shown you how to figure out what WordPress theme a website is using. Evidently, before taking looking for the WordPress theme, you’ll have to know for sure if the website is using WordPress as their Content Management System. After that, you can use the different methods mentioned in this post to find out the WordPress theme. If you have any questions or suggestions for future posts; make sure you leave a comment in the comment section below!

Here at Elegant Themes, we might make WordPress themes and plugins, but that doesn’t mean we’re blind to eCommerce trends. Shopify is growing rapidly, with 75% revenue growth year over year. That growth is, obviously, fueled by more and more people turning to Shopify to manage their store. So to stay on top of the trends, we decided to round up some of the best Shopify themes out there.

Sorry, folks – these won’t work with your WordPress site. But if you’ve been itching to launch a store on Shopify, consider one of these Shopify themes for your next project. Plus, just because you’re managing your store with Shopify doesn’t mean you can’t still use WordPress for other parts of your site!

Top Shopify Themes for 2017

In collecting these 20 Shopify themes, I was looking for a couple of things:

High review ratings – if a theme fared poorly in reviews, it didn’t make the list.

Developer support – either evidenced through recent updates or through the text of customer reviews

Beyond those two criteria, I also tried to find themes with different uses and styles so that all types of stores can get value from this list.

And finally, you’ll find both free and premium Shopify themes at different price points.

Let’s dive in…

1. District

District is a clean, grid-based Shopify theme that comes in three different style palettes. The large promo banner lets you promote your latest deals at the top of the page and it also includes galleries and sliders to promote your latest products further down.

You can also bring in a bold, full-width Instagram feed. And the built-in marketing popup gives you another avenue to share promotional offers.

Better yet, District has maintained a 100% positive rating on over 247 reviews.

2. Parallax Theme / Aspen

As you might have been able to guess from the name, one of Parallax theme’s defining features is its long-format, parallax homepage. Grab your shoppers’ attention with full-width images that look gorgeous with the parallax scrolling effect.

3. Supply

Supply is a free Shopify Theme built with a minimalist design specialized for displaying and filtering large inventories. It’s not especially creative, but it is well-suited for stores selling more practical products.

It comes with 2 different color styles, detailed filtering options, and a homepage slider to showcase multiple products on your homepage.

9. Avenue

Avenue is another popular Theme Forest Shopify theme. It features a helpful mega menu, AJAX wishlists and layered navigation, infinite scroll, and tons of other helpful features.

You’ll have a great deal of control over your product listing pages as well as your individual product pages. And you’ll also get a helpful newsletter opt-in popup that connects to MailChimp, as well as behind-the-scenes features like Google Rich Product Snippets and lazy loading.

11. Mobilia

Mobilia is a beautiful Shopify theme focused on helping you tell the story behind your brand. For that reason, it’s best suited for brands that rely on storytelling, rather than large product catalogs.

Beyond plenty of space on the homepage to tell your brand’s story, Mobilia also featured a full-width home page video, a full-width Instagram feed, multi-level menus, and a customizable sidebar.

12. Material

Material is a popular responsive Shopify theme for sale at ThemeForest. As the name hints at, Material is based on material design principles and features a video slider, advanced filtering module, mega menu, and a variety of layouts.

Beyond that, it also helps visitors shop without page reloads with a QuickShop feature, and it offers a variety of helpful widgets, as well as a dedicated lookbook page.

14. Loft

Loft is an interesting theme that showcases products in an eye-catching masonry grid on the homepage. It’s ideal for stores with large product catalogs and features neat custom promotion tiles that can fit into the masonry grid on the homepage.

Beyond that, it also features a multi-level menu, as well as story-focused product pages with plenty of space for additional text and images.

17. Venue

Venue is a Shopify theme built for stores that also sell products at physical locations. So if you have physical stores but also want to open up a web presence on Shopify, this is a great theme for you.

Beyond showcasing your products, Venue also helps you promote your physical stores by letting you share store details and events, as well as display multiple locations on a map.

Venue looks nice enough as a standalone eCommerce store, but this brick and mortar functionality is what sets it apart from the competition.

19. Fastor

Fastor is a flexible Shopify theme with a huge variety of pre-made demos. Over 73 of them, in fact!

Fastor is one of the best selling Shopify themes at Theme Forest, supports Shopify Sections, comes with a page builder, built-in wishlist app, and plenty of other helpful features like lookbooks and more.

20. Palo Alto

Palo Alto is a modern theme built for forward-focused brands with a story to tell. Because of its focus on storytelling, it’s a great option for brands with smaller catalogs.

Beyond plenty of space for extra text on product pages, Palo Alto also helps you tell your story with a bold hero video. And you can also easily bring in customer testimonials to boost your brand’s social proof.

One would think that purchasing a domain name is a relatively simple process. Go to Google, type in “best place to purchase domain name,” clickity-clickity, and you’re done. Ta-da!

Unfortunately, there is a bit more to it than that. At least, when you plan on actually using that domain. Finding the best place to purchase a domain name is important. You’re probably going to be with that service for years, after all.

Finding the best domain registrar for you is a combination of cost, services offered, and support. Not every company will work for every person or company, but depending on your needs, I’m confident we can find one that will work.

Namecheap

Namecheap has become one of the top domain registrars around. It may not be as well-known as some of the others, but it consistently outperforms other companies in cost, services, and support.

They have deals pretty often for different domain extensions as low as $0.88 USD, though it’s rare to find something like a .com at that price. Most prices tend to be around $10-12 USD, with specialty domains such as .blog, .tech, and .io running between $20-60 USD per year.

The main draw of Namecheap, in my opinion, is the quality of their overall platform. From managing DNS to ownership/registrar transfers, they are reliable and easy to use (even if you’re not familiar with the ins-ands-outs fo domain management).

Additionally, newly registered domains come with free WHOIS privacy for the first year. (And $2.88 USD per year afterward–considerably cheaper than most other places). You will save you a pretty penny if you register or transfer in bulk. Plus, their support has been quick to respond and fix every issue I’ve personally had within a day each time.

Google Domains

Google Domains is finally out of the invite-only phase of its deployment, and it is exactly what you’d expect out of a Google-run domain registrar. Things are simple, clean, and straightforward, and for the most part…they just work.

The real benefits in my mind of using Google Domains is the ease with which you can get things up and running. Your entire domain list is consolidated in your Google account, so if you use G-suite for work or Gmail et al for personal use, you’re good to go (with payment information likely already stored, so that’s a bonus).

There are a couple of downsides to the service, the first of which is that there are never any discounts (at least that I’ve discovered). You pay $12 USD per year for the more common TLDs (top-level domains), and pretty much every other extension under the sun is available for $20 all the way up to $120+. You do get WHOIS privacy bundled with the price of each domain, so that tends to make the service a bit more cost effective.

In terms of support, it’s typical Google. Sometimes it’s spot-on and your problem is solved ASAP, and others you’re sent through a Knowledge Base and Support Forum treasure hunt without a map. So yeah. Again, it’s what you’d expect.

Flippa

Flippa is not your average domain supplier. Not technically a registrar, but a marketplace (think eBay for website and domain names), Flippa lets you browse through thousands upon thousands of listings for domains that are for sale. Sometimes you can snag the perfect one from a squatter for pennies, and sometimes you can snag the perfect one from a squatter for thousands of dollars. It’s a crapshoot in the best kind of way.

The search function works like any other company: you type in keywords you want results for, and then you pick whether you want existing websites or domains (or apps or Shopify shops, technically).

They do tons of transactions every day, and their support has always been quick for me. The main downside to Flippa is that it’s not a pay-and-go service with set prices and rates. You’re dealing with other human beings, and we all know how that can be.

GoDaddy, Hostgator, and Bluehost

Okay, first of all, I know that these companies are not the same, but having used all of them for domain registration and hosting, I’ve had nearly identical experiences with each and everyone of them. Their prices and offerings are very, very similar, so I bundled them together.

In my mind, these are the big-box stores of domain registration, the Walmart, Target, and Costco. They have every last thing you need, are incredibly affordable and easy to work with, and when you have a problem, they’re happy to help (usually for an additional fee, depending on the extent to which you need them).

Things to Consider

With any registrar that offers discounted rates and major coupons, make sure you watch out for the renewal rate for successive years. If you have auto-renew on, at the end of that first year, you will be billed the “then-current” price, which has yet to be determined at your initial registration. Just because you paid $0.99 for that first year doesn’t mean that you won’t be paying $29.99 the next. Read the fine print.

Additionally, these kinds of registrars are more casual-user oriented, and therefore many of their services are tiered and priced with that market in mind. Features such as WHOIS privacy tend to be a la carte and higher-priced than at smaller, more niche-focused companies.

Customer support, in my experience at least, also tends to be similar. For both GoDaddy and Hostgator, I typically receive responses within a day, but the quality is hit-or-miss. (LiveChat tends to be more useful than email support lately.)

Clients and I both have been consistently upsold by both GoDaddy and Hostgator in the past to the tune of $75 USD for DNS issues and SSL certificate installation, all the way up to $300/hr a fix I handled in literally 3 minutes for a client after they were told the Hostgator technicians had to handle it over a couple of days.

My interactions with Bluehost customer service have been delightful, honestly, but neither I nor a client have needed anything as in-depth as with GoDaddy and Hostgator.

Admittedly, that’s all anecdotal, so if you plan on going with one of these three for domain registration, it’s personal preference.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy has WHOIS privacy in three tiers between $7.99 and $14.99 USD per year per domain

Bluehost

Name.com

Name.com has been around forever, and they are very well known in the domain industry. They have prices ranging anywhere from $3.99 USD per year to $100+, depending on how special you’re looking for. Name.com does offer sales, and their extension choices are far wider than many other hosts.

The WHOIS privacy option here is on the cheaper side at $4.99 USD per year, too. I would also like to mention that they do offer add-on email support–even if you don’t have a hosting plan through them. That’s a rare find, and I thought you’d wanna know about it.

These folks have built up a reputation on being reliable and consistent. If that’s what is important for you, you will find a lot to like here. They aren’t flashy, and they don’t have a gimmick. That’s pretty cool. They do what they set out to do, and they do it well.

DreamHost

There are over 400 domain extensions, and very few places can sell them all. DreamHost is one of them. So if the desire for that ultra-specific, specialty domain keeps you up at night, DreamHost has you covered. They run sales where you can pick up some extensions as low as $0.99 USD; however, common domains run around $12-15.

Regardless of where you fall on the politics, if privacy is one of your major issues, DreamHost may be your new BFF.

1&1

And finally, 1&1 is a lesser-known company that has a pretty nifty gimmick: they offer special domain extensions (such as .mobi, .pizza, .ninja) at discounted prices. While they’re still more expensive than a common .com (.common? #domainpun), you should definitely check them out to see if you can snag your startup’s awesome .io URL cheaper here than you can elsewhere.

Like many other registrars, 1&1 offers hosting services as well as the not-so-common standalone email. Additionally, they have a pretty sweet Microsoft Office 365 deal for businesses. 1&1’s deal might make it cheaper and more accessible than G-suite, depending on your company and team. (Or if your company hates Google like my previous one did.)

Did I Miss the Best Place to Purchase a Domain Name?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of where you can register a domain. But I do think it’s a list of the best places for you to do so. So if you want ease of use, customer support, privacy protection, or just plain-and-simple discounts, hopefully one of these will work out for you.

Which company do you use for domain registration? Let us all know where and why in the comments so we have even more fantastic options to choose from!